Week 1 – Introduction to Security Awareness

Description:
We were introduced to the idea of Cybersecurity this first week of school. We learned that cybersecurity should protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of our valuable information. We also learned that cybersecurity affects everyone of us and we are all responsible to make sure that we practice good “cyber-hygeine” with strong passwords, and good technique by being aware of ways that we can be easily compromised simply by using every day things like email or browsing the web.

Artifacts:

• Case Project - Project 1-1: Personal Attack Experiences - “The Couriers”
• Interactive Lab - Project 1-4: Are You a Victim?
• Screenshot of GitHub Pages live site:
  
  

Reflection:
We’ve learned that becoming complacent can’t ever happen. Everything is always changing and we need to be vigilant. We learned that more breaches are happening now than ever and it’s only going to increase. One challenge in preventing attacks and why it’s so difficult to solve is that the attack vector is constantly changing because the market is always changing. More things are becoming internet-aware and quickly brought to market without much concern of how well they play with others. For example we just bought a brake-controller; that brake controller required an application to run on our phone. I never imagined a brake-controller would become an attack-vector. Think about how dangerous it might be if someone hacked that app and could brake check our trailer and think about how that might scale up… like blackmailing the company.

Companies favor ease-of-use products for the sake of quarterly profits and the shareholders care more about being the first to bring products to market with security as an after-thought. Like the curriculum says, “something that is secure isn’t easy to use”, if you can’t use it, it won’t sell. We are relying more and more on these large corporations with our data and those companies are relying on our data for their profits. It seems like all these products these days have an app to login to. This trend is not going to stop. Being involved in Cybersecurity now more than ever is needed and hopefully by the end of this program we will all end up with decent jobs.

We were also introduced to analysis tools like hashcat, Cyber Skyline, rumkin and Cyberchef, which I hope to learn more about and so far enjoy the comraderie of the class I’m in.

AI Use Note:
Other than to make sure I had access and the introductory questions asked by ChatGPT’s Sage, I haven’t had time to use any AI tools this week.

Week 2 – Personal Cybersecurity

Description:
We read about how cybersecurity is a responsibility that falls on each individual person. For example, it takes one person with a weak password to allow someone to breach a system. We all need to be educated about password lengths and usage, requiring MFA, using a password database program, being able to recognize phsishing scams, and not over-sharing on social media. Doing these things is considered maintaining good cyber-hygiene.

Artifacts:

• Case Project - Project 2-1: Password Strength
  

AI Use Note:
Haven’t used AI yet.